A no-nonsense, evidence-based guide to building muscle without the noise Written by Andrew Caine, BSc Sport and Exercise Science, MSc Strength and Conditioning Everyone has an opinion on building muscle. Your mate down the gym, the bloke on TikTok, the influencer flogging a twelve week programme. Most of it is noise, and most of it is exactly why you feel like you train hard and get nowhere. So let me cut through it. This is the full picture, backed by the research and explained in plain...

The gym half of my Loch Ness build. What I keep, what I cut, why I stopped training for the camera, and the science behind why a runner should be lifting at all. Training like a petulant child who has just discovered the gym is a sure way to fuck yourself up and destroy your running prep. Now, I was not doing anything terrible before. I trained fairly smartly, picked the right exercises, did not overload myself into the ground. But if I am honest, I had got hooked on how it all looked from...

Training for the Loch Ness Marathon, and what changed when I finally coached myself the way I coach everyone else. Here is the confession first. I coach running, strength, fat loss and wellness for a living, and for a long stretch I was quietly making one of the most common mistakes in the book. Nearly every run I did sat in the same place. Not easy, not hard. That comfortable, breathless middle ground where you feel like you are working but you are not really building anything. The grey...